The Government Veto System

Mr. Fertig, syndicated newspaper columnist on economic affairs, is author of the book, Prosperity Through Freedom (Regnery, ¹96¹), available from the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, N. Y. $3.95.

Just when the Soviets admit the virtues of the free market econ­omy by trying to imitate some phases of it, our drive in the United States is perceptibly in the other direction—toward more gov­ernment intervention in the mar­ket. Just when the Soviet leaders are making sheep’s eyes at the market economy because they can see that direction by bureaucracy is no substitute for the flexibility of the free market — the United States substitutes government fiat for market forces in a number of vital areas.

This basic change has been tak­ing place in the American free-enterprise system practically un­opposed by the American public or by important business interests.

The new system cannot be called government control because it has not gone quite that far. A fair characterization of this new ar­rangement would be to call it the Government Veto System. The basis of the Government Veto System is direct action by the Administration to veto prices which it does not like in major markets in the economy. To be sure, this veto has been employed to date only in the case of "key" prices, but it has been proven time and again in the history of various countries that controls tend to breed still more controls. The objective which the control­lers hope to achieve always proves elusive, whether it be in the con­trol of commodity prices or of money. When the controllers are disappointed, their tendency is to blame lack of success on an in­sufficiency of power. So they ask for more controls and more power.

The Veto Power in Practice

There are five main areas where the United States government has used extra-legal pressure in an at­tempt to control the economy by the veto system.

First, there is an attempt to control prices for major products — especially steel. At various times the prices of steel, copper, molybdenum, and other products were rolled back after the govern­ment exerted pressure on the pro­ducing companies.

In regard to steel, President Johnson so far has officially not employed the strong-arm methods adopted by President Kennedy. He has not openly berated the steel companies, nor sent repre­sentatives of the Attorney Gen­eral’s office to the heads of steel companies before dawn to inter­rogate them. Nevertheless, his in­fluence on steel prices has been powerful. It was only in August this year, after the wage price guidelines had been flouted re­peatedly by various unions — es­pecially by the airline mechanics — that the steel companies were able to achieve a slight increase in price for about a third of their production. This long delay oc­curred despite the fact that the government’s own index of steel prices, prepared by the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed no increase from the end of 1958 to July this year. (The Index stood at approximately 102.3 in both periods.)

The veto system also operates against American corporations in their dealing with foreign coun­tries. Pressure is brought against corporations to limit their invest­ments in overseas operations. This is called "voluntary" control, al­though it is obvious that govern­ment coercion is behind it. Ad­ministration officials look over the shoulders of officers of major cor­porations and make the decision as to how much they shall invest abroad.

The veto system also applies to banks. They are restrained in the total which they can lend to bor­rowers in foreign countries. The declared purpose of this curtail­ment of dollar outflow is to aid the U.S. in retaining its gold stock and to improve the deficit in the U.S. balance-of-payments to foreign countries. But the gold outflow and the balance-of-payments defi­cit are due to entirely different causes. They are due to the gov­ernment’s monetary and fiscal policy. Nevertheless, in seeking to correct the problem, govern­ment officials clamp down on banks and corporations.

The price of borrowing money (interest rates) is another area where the Federal government veto system tries to operate. For a time it was successful in pre­venting privately-owned banks from assessing the grass roots market and raising prime interest rates. But inflation, caused by government deficits and easy-credit policies, was so strong that interest rates continued to rise un­til they reached the highest level in a generation. Month by month, Treasury officials exerted pressure on the banks to prevent a free market price for hiring of money.

Thus there exists a very effec­tive veto, although it is completely extra-legal and is effective only be­cause of the coercive power of government.

The Strike-Back

Congress has passed no law giv­ing the President power to control any of these prices or policies. Nevertheless the power of the Ex­ecutive Office is so great that no industry and no business can flout the government without fear of reprisal. Every businessman knows what this reprisal means. The Attorney General’s office can use its power on antitrust matters. The Federal Bureau of Investiga­tion can make special investiga­tions. The Defense Department can withhold contracts. There are many, many ways in which the government can act to bring recal­citrants into line.

In the area of wages, as well as prices, the Federal government has tried to exercise veto power. The President’s economic advisers laid down "guideposts" for wage rises. Until the airline mechanics strike the rule was that no wage rise should exceed 3.2 per cent. This figure is reported to be the average annual productivity gain of American industry in the last five years. Everyone knows that control over wages has been hon­ored more in the breach than in the observance. In the case of major industries (automobile, con­struction, electrical, dock workers, and others) government officials have collaborated in violating their own guideposts.

After settlement of the airline mechanics strike, P. L. Siemiller, President of the International As­sociation of Machinists, proudly said the settlement "destroys all existing wage and price guidelines now in existence." Government veto on wage rises has been far less effective than on prices. But it continues to be a stated govern­ment policy.

Why has the government moved in the direction of intervention in the market instead of letting sup­ply and demand set prices? Why has it substituted decisions by some economists or some bureau­crats for the free forces of the market which have operated so successfully in the American economy?

Embarrassing Inflation

The answer is quite plain. Gov­ernment inflationary monetary policy plus Federal deficits have so vastly increased potential demand that the Administration is embar­rassed to let the law of supply and demand work naturally.

As a result of government poli­cies, the money supply (demand deposits plus currency) increased at a phenomenal rate in the last two years. This increase in the quantity of newly-created money sought to express itself in every way possible. This unprecedented increase in bank deposits and cur­rency exerted upward pressure on prices in one market or another.

When the effects of this infla­tionary policy became evident to the public and prices began to rise steeply, officials became alarmed and decided to step in. Thus the government tries to substitute its command (veto over prices) for the answers which would be given by the operation of the free mar­ket. The result of such a policy is an unhealthy repressed inflation.

Intrying to replace the price system even partially by govern­ment fiat, appeals are always made to "social responsibility." Every businessman and every labor union leader is supposed to wear two hats. In deciding what is in the best interests of his company or his group he wears one hat. When he goes into a deep study to de­cide, if he can, what is in the pub­lic interest, he must wear another hat. But how to determine pre­cisely what is in "the public in­terest" and where "social respon­sibility" lies is impossible for any­one to judge. Every individual knows precisely what is in his own interest, and the competi­tive free market economy decides for him whether he can gain his objective. But how can he become a seer and judge whether his ac­tion is in the interest of 190 mil­lion people every time he makes a decision? The attempt to force people to act "in the public inter­est" instead of their own is merely an attempt by bureaucrats in gov­ernment to impose their own judg­ments on the economy.

"Social Responsibility"

At this point I would like to bor­row from Professor Milton Fried­man, who has made so many solid contributions to the free market philosophy. In a talk he made to the Institute for Religious and Social Studies he discussed the subject of social responsibility and made some acute observations.

Almost without exception, appeals to "social responsibility" arise be­cause of an unwillingness to let the price system work. They constitute an attempt to replace the price sys­tem by some alternative device. But no one has yet invented or dis­covered a device that can do the job which the price system does: of co­ordinating the activities of countless millions of people impersonally and without any need for central con­trol; of providing a mechanism that simultaneously transmits information about changing demand and avail-abilities, gives economic agents an incentive to act appropriately in re­sponse to the information trans­mitted, and adjusts consumption to available supplies in the short run of rationing the supplies while simul­taneously providing for adjusting production to consumption in the long run. The attempts to use alter­native devices have been numerous and often on a very large scale —witness legal price control in the United States during wartime or central economic planning in Russia. In all cases, they have been largely unsuccessful, and the price system, albeit with large scale distortions introduced into the signals on which it operates, has remained a major means for organizing economic ac­tivity.

Because the price system works impersonally, automatically, and quietly, because it has no press agents, there is a tendency when it works well to take it for granted and for the non-economist hardly to recognize that it is performing a function. It is natural for him to think he can manipulate prices with­out any serious consequences; but he invariably finds when he does so that he has mounted the tiger, and he is driven to an ever-widening range of measures because of the difficulty of dismounting. Our agri­cultural price support program, no less than legal price-control and the voluntary restraint programs, are all striking examples.

Our Image Abroad

In pursuing this policy of Fed­eral vetoes on important prices, the United States government has unfortunately had to turn its back on its own international policies and preachments. The U.S. State Department has advised foreign nations repeatedly against ex­change controls, against impedi­ments to the free flow of goods and money across national bound­ary lines. It has admonished many countries — in South America par­ticularly — to avoid inflationary policies which would inevitably lead to restrictive price-wage poli­cies and exchange controls. But it is now evident that when the United States faced inflationary pressures due to its own policies, it did not subscribe to the advice it gave other nations. Instead of relying upon monetary discipline, balanced budgets, and the free market, the United States adopted a policy of controls in many vital areas.

For the sake of achieving doubt­ful, ephemeral benefits, the U.S. government seriously weakened its economic and financial leader­ship of the noncommunist world, which is essential for the defense of the West against totalitarian­ism. Only by a return to the prin­ciples of the free market can this country re-assert that leadership.

THE FREEMAN

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CURRENT ISSUE

December 2014

Unfortunately, educating people about phenomena that are counterintuitive, not-so-easy to remember, and suggest our individual lack of human control (for starters) can seem like an uphill battle in the war of ideas. So we sally forth into a kind of wilderness, an economic fairyland. We are myth busters in a world where people crave myths more than reality. Why do they so readily embrace untruth? Primarily because the immediate costs of doing so are so low and the psychic benefits are so high.